


coming undone

by Dovey



Series: Bittersweet Treats [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: (but not sided the way you probably assume), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Angst, BAMF Haruno Sakura, Drug Abuse, Drug Use, Hallucinations, Haruno Sakura-centric, Heavy Angst, One-Sided Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke, Unhappy Ending, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, suicidal behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 23:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14365557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dovey/pseuds/Dovey
Summary: The Uchiha Massacre is world-famous within weeks.  The homicide of the Haruno family, in comparison, is a barely a blip on the radar- another case of personal drama with an unfortunate end. Sakura, the only survivor of her family tragedy, tries to grow up normal, chasing after boys and running away from nightmares.She doesn't grow up normal.





	coming undone

**Author's Note:**

> i've got to focus on art for my art booth coming up, and i've been suffering from writers block lately anyways, so have a sad sakura story to tide you over. its below my personal standard but i can't seem to fix it thanks to my block, so i figure better to put out this rather than a subpar chapter out of my unedited stock.

The Uchiha had suffered a massacre. It was whispered about for weeks, easy to overhear if not easy to understand. Hundreds had died, an entire district emptied in a matter of hours. Only Sasuke survived, and Sakura knew she could never fully understand that. But she thinks she can come closer than most.

She’d only survived a homicide, after all.

It happened every so often, more than you’d think. A disgruntled son or an abusive parent snaps and takes his family members with him. A tragic blip on the radar for a place as used to death as Konoha.

When she was four, she’d heard her big brother yelling outside the front door, and then she saw the family axe slice through the door, bit by bit. They kept that axe out back for splitting firewood, and she’d never realized it could be used on other things before. Then Kaa-san took her hand and rushed into her sewing room and made her climb into the smallest drawer she could fit in, just like when she played hide and seek last week with Ino and got scolded for making everyone worry when they couldn’t find her and she didn’t come out right away. That was the last time she saw her Kaa-san.

She survived because of dumb luck, and because of her neighbor Midoriya-san. He was always nice, and he worked all day as a carpenter so he was strong, and he came over to their house when he heard noises and when he saw the state of their door he ran in, and he had a hammer from work and he hit big brother really hard, and big brother didn’t like that and hit him with his axe, thwack thwack thwack, and Sakura can still remember the sounds from that dark cramped spot she was hiding in, but Midoriya-san won and he called out her name anxiously- actually, he’d gotten her name wrong, because he knew the neighbors had a kid her age but they were never close- and when she came out he was leaning against the wall and she held a towel to where his arm sorta-is, most of it dangling off all awful and gross, and he held her hand until the medics and police got there.

He couldn’t use his right arm after that, so he couldn’t work anymore for a while- not until he got used to his fake arm- so he does crappy jobs to pay for their food and Sakura promises herself she’ll work really hard to take care of them.

It’s this promise she’s thinking of when she first meets her Jounin-sensei.

Kakashi-sensei looked at them all like they were dirt staining new sheets, and then he said, “Fine. Don’t waste my time, just tell me why you want to be a ninja and I’ll see if it’s not a totally useless effort. You.”

“Yes! I’m Naruto, and I want to be a ninja so I can be hokage so people will admire me!”

“I will kill a certain man.”

Sakura considered her words carefully. It’s true she wants to be a ninja to protect others, and to never be weak enough to leave the fight to others. But she’s not naive enough to not realize that some missions will require hurting the weak, attacking others- the job comes with sacrifices, and if she was motivated entirely by compassion, she would become a doctor or paramedic.

“I want to earn enough to cover Midoriya-san’s retirement.” She settles on, instead, and she can feel the disgust from all three fellow nin at her words. As if their goals were less self-serving! She kept her own feelings to herself, and held her unwavering gaze with the reproachful sensei until he sighed and gave up.

“Well, this will make failing you all so much the easier. Not a worthy goal among you all.”

They pass the test after all, and nobody asks Sakura about her goals again after that.  
-  
She has nightmares about axes, the sounds they make when they hit flesh. Ninja can’t have nightmares, so she goes to Kakashi and demands he teach her how to use battle axes.

“They’re not right for your size.” He tells her. “They’re heavy, and difficult to learn to weild well.” He adds. “When used in close combat, it can be traumatizing in comparison to more subtle tools.”

“Teach me anyways.” She says, and he sighs and agrees, and that’s that.

She works to exhaustion every day, hefting around the heaviest weights she can manage and practicing with wooden lead-weighted mockeries of her future weapons. Connected by rope instead of chain, and she can see the way the others look at her, as if she’s playing around with a toy in comparison to the sword in Sasuke’s grasp or the shuriken in Naruto’s.

She adds more weight to her tools and carries on anyways.

\--  
She’s out of shuriken, out of kunai, and there’s one thing left in her pouch that’s never let her down before. She grabs for it’s handle, and in one deft swing hits the enemy in the side of the head- he’d moved to block it if it’d been the blade he was expecting, and in his reeling pain from the heavy hit she slams the jagged end meant for pulling up nails into his eye socket and yanks.

He bleeds out quickly. If she was more sympathetic, she might finish the job to make the pain end faster for him, but she cares too much about potentially breaking her hammer to risk it.

“Sakura-chan, why do you have a hammer?” Naruto asks, and it’s a fair question. She meticulously cleans the thing, until the new blood is gone and all that’s left is the tint from her big brother’s bloody end, and slides it back unto her pouch. She sets about collecting all the deflected kunai, and sends Naruto a casual shrug.

“It’s a good luck charm.” She tells him.

\--  
She knows they don’t need her, but it’s tough to swallow that they don’t want her. But there they are, far ahead of her, the perfect picture of a team, of a family. Squabbling siblings and the doting parent, and if Sakura was lucky she might count as the family pet. She can’t keep up, never could, and none of them were slowing down to catch her.

She goes to the chuunin assignment desk and begs for missions that she can do on her own. She has no idea if she’ll ever pass the chuunin exam, and she needs to start saving up now if Midoriya will ever be able to retire. The man at the desk gives her the shittiest jobs on the list, and she does them well without complaint, until he starts to go easy on her and doesn’t fight with her about doing the work solo. They have a joking comradery, even, when Kakashi decides to punish the team and sends them all to do a d-rank.

Eventually, she starts to get a reputation as a good worker, and teams put in requests for her when they need an extra hand. It’s nice, feeling valued, and she works extra hard on those tasks to make sure they don’t regret it. One day, a few hours after one of those missions with a Hyuuga Jounin and his chuunin team, she’s called in to the see the Hokage.

Hokage-sama gives her a calculating inspection, and Sakura holds her breath and hopes for the best.

“You’re strong, but not very advanced.” Tsunade says, assessment done. “Hardworker, don’t ask dumb questions, loyal.”

Sakura blushes gently under the praise. Tsunade, prone to dramatic flairs, leans back in her chair and crosses her legs.

“You want to make more money, yeah?”  
Sakura nods eagerly.

“I need an apprentice.”

The words fill Sakura with as much excitement as they do confusion.

“But Hinata-san is-” Sakura begins, and Tsunade waves her concerns off.

“Hinata is my medical apprentice. She’s talented, but soft hearted. She still hesitates for most kills. You’ve got potential, Sakura, on the battlefield.”

Sakura can’t help but wonder how she knows that, and it must show on her face, because Tsunade looks towards the window and offhandedly says,

“I know why you use battle-axes.”

Sakura freezes, before forcing herself to loosen, and bows.

“What does my apprenticeship entail?”  
\--  
She spends less time in the village than before. Tsunade makes caring for Midoriya-san a recurring genin mission, to her relief, so she doesn’t really mind the long absences.

Her missions aren’t always nice. They rarely are easy. But she does them, because Tsunade thinks she can or she wouldn’t have been assigned them, and she’d do almost anything for Tsunade-sama.

So she burns down villages and hunts down spirits and steals treasured jutsus, and Konoha flourishes, and Tsunade smiles, and Midoriya doesn’t have to worry about missing meals.

She sometimes has nightmares, but then she starts to make pills to make sleeping easy, and it’s fine. Sometimes she sees things that aren’t there, feels the ghost of hands on her neck or the cramped walls of that drawer, hears the thwack of an axe or the yells of some of her targets, but then she makes pills for that too and it’s fine. She still hears and sees the things, but the pills take the edge off so she doesn’t react, and if nobody knows what’s happening it’s almost like it isn’t happening at all.

She can tell Tsunade knows, but Tsunade is the only one who knows everything Sakura has done, and Tsunade doesn’t make her stop and Sakura loves her so much. Hinata knows too, from the look on her face when she sees Sakura’s spacey gaze and dizzy steps, all pity and sorrow and disdain mixed together, but she can’t stopped Sakura and that’s all that matters in the end.

The only time besides missions she doesn’t take her pills is when she visits her summons. A streak of tigers, the biggest of them she calls Cha-sama, and she loves them dear enough to avoid dulling her experience at the edges. Cha-sama has sharp teeth and soft fur and sharp eyes, and when Sakura visits them she doesn’t have to worry about sneak attacks or her hallucinations shifting into reality. When she stays with them, she dreams about having claws and stripes and a family to hunt with.

The sacrifice of signing with tigers is that when you die, they eat you. She dreams about that too, sometimes, of giving back to them in the most primal way, and it makes her smile to know her body won’t go to waste. That’s why they let her sign, she thinks.

Midoriya-san died a little after Sasuke left the village, and she doesn’t like to think about it but she visits his grave a lot anyways. It’s a good one, next to her parents, near a pretty sakura tree that gives it shade, and she makes sure to clean all three every time she comes back from a mission. When she’s disoriented or high enough, she’ll clean her brother’s too.

Once, she had a Bad Mission. She doesn’t like to talk about those, or think about them, so when she gets cleared from the hospital she takes as many of her pills as she can keep down- they’ve been working less and less, lately, so she’s had to up the dose to match- and stumbles out to meet team seven for the reunion meal she’d promised to attend.

She can’t look Naruto in the eyes, because his hair looks like the girl from The Mission, so she looks at the spot on his brow between his eyes and fakes it. She listens to Kakashi talk about the newest Icha-Icha, and Naruto brag about how good Hinata has been doing at the hospital lately, and Sasuke even talks a little about a new jutsu he’s been experimenting with. Sakura doesn’t even remember what she says, the lights are too bright and her head hurts so bad, and she trips twice when they leave the restaurant and falls into the boys.

For a second, she can still see the blood on her hands, and it’s staining their clothes, so she tears them away as quickly as she can.

“Are you okay, Sakura-chan?” Naruto asks, and she laughs and then vomits into the street and she can’t feel her legs.

“Little sick.” She explains, even as they both grab her sides to help keep her upright. “It’s- I’m just a little sick. From my mission, picked up a bug, it’s nothing, really.”

They help her home and leave her there, and she wakes up alone with the taste of bile in her mouth and the stain of tears on her cheeks.

She should probably cut back on the pills, she thinks, but she takes them anyways because the hallucinations are encroaching and so are her worries and anything is better than that.

After that, she sees Sasuke a lot.

He offers to carry her things, and he makes her eat lunch with him. It’s weird, and she doesn’t really get it, but she must be the only one who doesn’t because the others keep giving her knowing looks when it happens.

She doesn’t know what he wants, and it sets her on edge, even when she’s so consistently buzzed. He doesn’t seem to notice it, her airy giggles and loose movements getting chalked up to just being Sakura, the sweet genin she’d once been beneath the chuunin persona. The way her eyes dart around for threats, sometimes finding ones that aren’t there, passes by unnoticed. She’s upped her dose again, and now even the images of Big Brother don’t set her off. Her reflexes are sloppy when Sasuke pushes her into impromptu spars, and he finds it endearing if concerning.

“It’s not safe for her to be on some of the missions she does.” He tells Kakashi, worried about what slow response times could result in. Kakashi takes his words to the Hokage, and she just raises an unimpressed brow at him.

“Are you sure you trust the Uchiha’s judgement on this?” She presses, and Kakashi swears he does, so she promises that Sakura will be switched from B & C ranks back down to only D & C, and Kakashi leaves to share the good news.

Officially, on the record, her promise is upheld. But Tiger-San has been working high ranking cases for years, now, and the sudden increase to her schedule shows no signs of stopping. She’s never sloppy on missions, never a risk to the cause. She is perfection at her tasks, exemplary in the field, and Tsunade holds too tightly to her own vice to judge the girl for how she survives off the job. It hurts, to see a girl she sees as a daughter, unraveling piece by piece, but it’s not something she can prevent. The same problems gnaw at her, too, and so they both spend their days in a state of haze to get by.

They get by. They rarely manage more than that.

The day Sasuke asks her to marry him, she’s half-drunk and still dirty from her last mission. She blinks at him in shock, doesn’t know what to say. She’s pretty sure it’s not a hallucination, but she’s got no proof, so she just stares at him until he asks her again.

“Why?” She asks, because she can see no earthly reason the man in front of her wouldn’t go ask someone without a death wish. He looks shocked by the question, and it takes a few seconds for him to reply.

“Because you understand me better than anyone else, and I understand you. And even if I was shitty about expressing it- we’ve been in love since we were kids.”

She has no idea if she loves him. She thinks she does, maybe, but there was definitely a chunk of time where she hated him, and then she was scared of him, and now she doesn’t have much space in her head for anything at all. She can’t feel her left arm, and her chest hurts, and her heartbeat is too fast for all the wrong reasons, and her head is numb. If she does love him it’s pretty low on her list of priorities.

The past hour they’ve been together, she kept seeing him in his old clothes, from when he’d left Konoha, and she kept seeing his eyes turn red. She’d heard his laugh from the valley, bouncing the air, and the only reason she hadn’t reacted was because she’d chugged a bottle of Tsunade’s strongest when she heard Sasuke was coming to take her out to lunch.

“I have to go back to work.” She says, and she makes a run for it. To her relief, he doesn’t give chase.

\--

They get a mission, all of team seven- or, that is, all of team seven and Tiger-san, because it’s too high-ranking for Sakura.

She can feel Kakashi sizing her up, and she wants to snarl at him for it- he hasn’t been anbu in years, or else he’d already know her proficient record. Naruto is whining about wishing it could be a full team reunion, and Sasuke smacks him on the head for it.

“It wouldn’t be safe for Sakura.” He tells him, and Sakura is very careful to not react to the words as Naruto begins to tease him about being overprotective.

It takes less than a day, to get to the temple. The missions was simple- collect the information inside, and bring it back. Try to avoid dying along the way.

A few of Naruto’s clones discover the booby traps for them at the start, and they handle the ensuing battles with the guardian spirits of the place well enough. She doesn’t even have to summon support, and they’re all in good moods by the time they get to the prize of it all.

This guardian doesn’t look like they want a fight. They smile, ethereal and scary, and gesture towards the scroll the team had come all this way to claim.

“It comes at a price.” They say, and Naruto stops in his tracks mid-run towards the guardian.

“What kinda price?” He ask, suspicious.

“If you wish to know a curse like this, it must be a worthy cause. Whoever claims the scroll for your people with be afflicted with the curse in its worst form, and die within the day.”

“What? No way!” Naruto shouts, turning to glare at the others in case they’d dare offer to take on the task. “We can figure this out! Sasuke, you’re good at riddles!”

Sasuke scoffs, and when they descend into an argument, Sakura makes her way to the scroll and carefully picks it up.

Immediately, it hits her, and she wilts slightly under the pain before standing up more carefully.

“Boys!” She calls out, and the squabbling stops when they see that she’s taken it. “Let’s get this to Tsunade-sama already.”

“But- but Tiger-san!”

“It’s the mission.” She says, with a shrug, leading the charge out of the temple. “I was already dying.” She adds, because it’s obvious the incredulous boy will slow them down if he doesn’t accept what’s happened.

It’s sort of true. Her organs had been failing, lately, from all the stress from her pills, and she could only heal them so much. Or the village could be invaded again, and she’d be too out of it to fight back- or she’d assume it was another hallucination.

“Can we hurry? I need to say goodbye to some people.”

That sparks a fire, at least, and they can finally move at a faster pace.

\--  
The mask cracks when tsunade hits her in the face, and the lower half splits off.

“I told you to try not to die!” She spits out, furious and heartbroken. There’s nothing she can do. The curse has engulfed half of her apprentice’s body already, and she’s withering away in front of her.

“Sorry, shishou.” Sakura says, and Kakashi stills at the words because they’re familiar in a way they shouldn’t be. “Won’t happen again.” She adds, jokingly, and Tsunade spits out a string of curses that could make a sailor cry.

She beckons Sakura over, pulls her into a crushing hug, and keeps a hand on her arm as she pulls her back and asks, “What do you need to do?”

Sakura shrugs, lip quivering. “You know where my grave should be, yeah?”

Next to Midoriya-sans. Tsunade nodded.

“Then I just need to get my summons.”

“Do you want something for the pain?”

Sakura gives a rueful head shake, and replies, “Can’t have anything in my system when they eat me. Bad for their digestion.”

“When they what?” Naruto asks, but Kakashi cuts them both off and presses,

“Is that really all you have to do?”

She took a second to think about it. She’d said goodbye to Tsunade. Midoriya was dead. She’d see the summons soon.

“Yeah.” She says, leaning on tsunade for support.

If she was in her normal state, he’d never have gotten close. As she is, he barely manages to snag the mask off her.

“Sa- Sakura?” Naruto stutters out, and Sasuke’s gone pale. “H- Hinata can fix this! Or Tsunade, come on, you old bat, you can’t just let her-”

Kakashi slaps a hand over Naruto’s mouth and hushes him. “I’m disappointed you didn’t think to tell us goodbye, Sakura-chan.”

She doesn’t have a response. She focuses on keeping herself upright, which is getting more and more difficult as time passes and the curse spreads through her bloodstream.

“You were dying?” Sasuke whispers.

“I was a lot of things.” she replies, nonchalant as she can manage. “It doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> matt maeson is one of my favorite artists, and this was actually partially inspired by his song about his recovery from drug addiction, Hallucinogenics. His songs about struggling with depression have always been a big help to me. 
> 
> This is also partially inspired by the super cool, way-too-expensive, Sakura figurine where she has two gigantic battleaxes in her genin form for no apparent reason. if i had $400 to blow and an inability to feel guilt, absolutely i'd buy it. neither of those things are the case, unfortunately :(


End file.
